The Partnership

by Barry Unsworth

  ‘Impressive, don’t you think?’ said Foley. ‘Most of the originals were genuine antiques. These are all copies, of course, but I think you get the effect. Oh yes, quite definitely, I think you get the effect.’

  ‘But how do you get the gold on them, this dark gold,’ Gwendoline asked. ‘It looks antique. I mean you’d never think they were modern.’

  Foley’s habitual secretiveness reasserted itself. ‘It’s a special process,’ he said. ‘You wouldn’t understand it, even if I told you.’ After a moment or two, however, he could not resist adding: ‘It’s gold-leaf, actually. You use a special sort of very thin glue that seals off the plaster and acts as a base for the gilt. Then all you do is flake on the leaf just with a finger-tip, smoothing it over. The glue darkens the gold, you see, and gives it a bit of body, takes the newness off. If you get good quality gold-leaf you can put a sort of patina on, just by rubbing over with your fingers.’ No harm in telling her this much, he reflected. There was nothing she could do about it anyway. ‘There’d be no point in anyone else trying to do it,’ he said. ‘You have, to have the special formula for the consistency of the plaster, everything depends on the plaster. You see –’

  ‘You don’t think, do you,’ Gwendoline said, ‘that I’m after your trade secrets? I mean, quite honestly, I’m not all that interested.’

  ‘No, of course not, of course I didn’t think that. Besides, you couldn’t do it even if you wanted to, it’s not as easy as it looks, believe me, the plaster –’

  ‘For heaven’s sake,’ Gwendoline said.

  ‘Look at that one over there,’ Foley said, struggling free from his jealousy. ‘That is one of the best of them.’ He pointed to a large and particularly rotund cherub in ascending flight against the wall, with spread wings, blind curly head braced back on plump shoulders.

  ‘He looks,’ said Gwendoline after a moment’s scrutiny, ‘as if his bottom were wreathed in smiles.’ She uttered an artificial laugh.

  Foley smiled stiffly. ‘Expensive, of course,’ he said. ‘All the moulds had to be made specially. That costs quite a bit, you know. And we haven’t had anything back on them yet! We will in time, of course, and not just seasonal sales either. It will get us out of this cheap souvenir business altogether, before much longer. I’m only waiting for the season to be over –’

  ‘Forgive what must seem my stupidity,’ said Gwendoline, still tinkling slightly, ‘but what are they actually for?’

  ‘They are lamps,’ he said. ‘Most of them aren’t actually fitted up yet, but one or two are.’ He went over to a switch near the door and with a click selected areas of the room sprang into prominence. ‘Wall lamps, table lamps,’ he said. ‘No use for outside, of course, although they could be used in porches and verandahs. To go with either a traditional or contemporary interior.’

  Several of the flying figures were now irradiated and Gwendoline saw their limbs swirled into dark blue lampshades as though by suction.

  ‘We’ve got our own way of threading the flex and fitting sockets so that it hardly shows at all. There’s really no end to the possibilities of these lamps. I’m just waiting till the season’s over to take a trip round with a few samples. Plymouth, Torquay, London – there’s no reason why someone like Peter Jones shouldn’t be interested in them.’

  ‘No reason at all, I’m sure,’ Gwendoline said. ‘And it doesn’t really matter that they’re imitations and only made of plaster, does it?’

  Foley looked at her with concealed resentment. The heavy-lidded, insolent expression was well in evidence. It was her lack of response to him personally that he minded, not her failure to be impressed by the cherubs. They were beyond the verdicts of such a faulty taste. But he had laid himself out to flatter her by this inclusion, to get her on his side; and he had to admit that he had failed. His enthusiasm seemed merely to make her more sceptical. Her character, he thought, would have suited a more angular frame.

  He glanced round the room again, with renewed pride, at the radiant figures flying up into their blue shades. He experienced at times, standing among them thus, something of the loving absorption of the original artists, those obscure carvers whose names he would never know, who had cared nothing for naturalism nor even relevance, lost as they had been in the sheer proliferations of the flesh, the passionate intricacies of knee and navel. There was in these very excesses, he always felt, a spirit of devotion. Why after all should angel-boys be skinny? Really healthy religious feeling should take, surely, forms voluptuous rather than austere.

  ‘You don’t seem to care for them much,’ he said, and now his anger was swallowed up in pity for her denseness.

  Oh, I don’t mind them,’ Gwendoline said. ‘They seem a bit overdone to me, but I don’t mind them. It just seems a funny sort of way to get a living, that’s all.’

  This remark so wounded Foley that his manners for the moment quite deserted him. He switched off the lights without another word and held the door open pointedly. He knew something about funny ways of getting a living. It was precisely from a life devoted to such shabby expedients that he had fled here from London, built up a business, become established. It was to funny ways of getting a living that failure here would doom him to return. After all his efforts, to be criticised in this way, and by a person he was trying to impress. After his scheming and his incredible luck in meeting a person like Moss, gullible and unattached, and with a bit put by, exactly at the right moment. Just when he was beginning to feel some confidence in his status as craftsman and business man. He recognised, however, that it was all his own fault for showing Gwendoline how much he cared about the cherubs, how much they meant to him. True, he had hoped to get something out of it; but that made no difference really, self-betrayal was always a mistake.

  So mortified was he that he quite failed to follow up the bedroom aspect of things. He only half opened the door and said, ‘This is my bedroom,’ without even trying to get her inside. Gwendoline stood in the doorway and took a quick look at the bed with its Royal Stuart tartan cover, the dressing-table with its oval mirror, and the sea-green walls. She was already turning away when she seemed to see something through the bedroom window. ‘Who on earth is that old man?’ she said, actually advancing into the room of her own accord. ‘Who is it, Ronald?’ she said. ‘A most extraordinary-looking old man, all covered with flour, with no shirt on, only a vest.’

  ‘Plaster, not flour,’ said Foley, following her to the window. ‘That’s Walter. He comes in from the village from time to time to help move the sacks of plaster about. I’m not really clear what he does. Moss takes care of the plaster, you see, getting it in and shifting it about and so on. He gets in this old chap to help him. See that barn-looking place over there, near where he’s standing? That’s where the plaster is kept. He must have just come out of there, that’s why he’s standing still like that. It’s probably rather dark inside, you see, and he’s just getting his bearings.’

  ‘He seems very old to be lifting heavy sacks about,’ said Gwendoline. ‘And he’s all doubled up. Why doesn’t he stand upright?’

  ‘He’s very strong, you know,’ Foley said. ‘The money he gets from us supplements his pension. He wouldn’t miss coming here for the world.’ He had exchanged barely half a dozen words with Walter and did not in the least know how he felt on this or any other issue, but he felt bound to defend himself against the implied charge of exploiting the aged and infirm. ‘It gives him an interest in life,’ he added.

  ‘But why is he doubled up like that?’ Gwendoline persisted. ‘Why won’t he stand up straight?’

  ‘Well, because he can’t of course,’ Foley said rather impatiently. ‘Surely you can see that?’ He felt that he was still being got at by these questions, but when he glanced at Gwendoline he saw that she was completely absorbed. Her face had a startled, almost stricken, look.

  They stood together side by side at the window watching Walter who had not, except for a slight weaving motion of the head, so far budged.
He seemed bemused this afternoon, as though not sure where to go next. Perhaps the bright sunshine had dazed him. It was impossible to tell from his expression why he was standing there, because his face and indeed his whole person were thickly covered with plaster dust. His eyes and mouth made three dark holes in it like stick-holes in snow. He did not change his position, but the swaying motion of his head intensified slowly in what seemed an endeavour to get a look at the sky. He would never now regain an upright posture, but his aged and dwindled head went on trying to right itself, constantly straining at the rigid harness of the neck, moving from side to side in efforts to circumvent his affliction. The exercise had highly developed his neck tendons and given him a blind, weaving appearance like a charmed tortoise.

  ‘Why doesn’t he move? What’s the matter with him?’ Gwendoline said, in tones of horror. ‘Is he going to stand there all afternoon?’

  ‘He’ll move when he’s ready,’ Foley said. But Walter continued to stand there.

  ‘He is the grotesquest thing,’ said Gwendoline, slowly and judiciously, ‘that I have ever seen in all my life.’

  Foley too was struck by the awfulness of Walter’s appearance. But he felt impelled to deliver the male rebuke, play the thing down. ‘Oh well,’ he said. ‘No one looks their best when they’re covered all over with plaster dust. He is really quite presentable, you know, when you see him dressed up.’

  Gwendoline pressed herself suddenly against his side. ‘I wish he would move,’ she said.

  She really was upset, Foley realised. A faint hope was reborn in him. One sort of emotion can easily lead to another. The more general souping-up the better. Perhaps he would yet have cause to feel grateful to Walter. Casually he put an arm round her waist. He said, ‘He’s probably enjoying the sunshine, you know, after lumping sacks of plaster about inside that barn.’

  ‘Look, he’s starting to move!’ cried Gwendoline, in excited and fearful tones as though she were assisting at the resuscitation of some sort of unpredictable animal. ‘Where’s he going now?’

  Foley paused for a moment or two before replying. The steady pressure of Gwendoline’s hip against his own was beginning to work its own, remorseless, resuscitation.

  ‘He’s going to wash himself down at the pump,’ he said carefully. ‘Over there at the side of the barn.’

  Walter crossed slowly over to the pump and having first placed the metal bucket under the tap, began to work away at the wooden handle.

  The water came out with a sudden thick gush and flashed in the sunshine as it tumbled down into the bucket. Walter went on pumping steadily until the bucket brimmed and spilled over into the stone basin. Then he began fumbling with himself in the region of the right hip eventually producing a small piece of yellow soap.

  ‘Everywhere he goes he carries soap around with him,’ Gwendoline whispered.

  ‘Cleanliness is next to godliness with some of these people,’ Foley said, shifting his position slightly. In an effort to distract her he kissed her on the temple but she hardly seemed to notice it, so absorbed was she in the successive phases of Walter’s ablutions.

  ‘I think I preferred him covered in dust,’ he heard her say after some moments and glancing out of the window again he saw Walter, all clean and veinous, rubbing his head with a piece of grey material which might have been a towel, though where it could have come from was difficult to see. The old man’s biceps must once have been considerable: they moved slackly now, with the movements of his arms. His face emerged at last from the towel, ferrety and sharp nosed; he cast a final denunciatory glance over the farmyard and then, towel over shoulder and soap back in pocket, slowly took himself off.

  Gwendoline at last allowed herself to be turned and held closely, a position in which the extent of Foley’s excitement must have become obvious to her. No recognition of it, however, appeared on her face, which wore an abstracted look.

  ‘I’ve never seen an old man’s body before,’ she said. ‘It’s rather horrible, isn’t it? When you think of death, of actually being dead and buried, what do you think about mainly?’

  ‘I don’t know, really,’ said Foley.

  ‘Well, it’s rotting I think about,’ said Gwendoline. ‘You know, sort of liquefying. That’s what makes the thought of it so awful: to me, at any rate. But seeing something very old makes you think it’s not like that at all. That old man is so dry and stringy, isn’t he? He looks as if he’d go hard, like leather.’

  Nothing could have seemed to Foley at this moment less apposite than reflections on death and decay; but he felt slightly ashamed of the irrelevance of his erection to these universal themes. For this reason he felt constrained to respect her desire for an exchange of views.

  ‘I don’t honestly see that it matters,’ he said, ‘once your breath is stopped, whether your flesh runs off you or gets pickled.’ He locked his hands in the small of Gwendoline’s back. ‘It’s not our turn yet, is it?’ he said.

  While he was speaking Gwendoline had begun a slight lateral rubbing motion against him. She raised her head and looked at him without ceasing these movements, and he was surprised to see that her expression seemed to contain no slightest acknowledgement of what was happening: her face in fact appeared to have intensified its abstract and rather theoretical look. He kissed her as tellingly as he was able and found her mouth hot and unmistakably compliant. This rubbing threatened now if kept up any longer to impair his control and he began to steer Gwendoline with a sort of slow tango step back towards the Royal Stuart. The bed caught her behind the knees and she fell rather statuesquely backwards on to it, with Foley on top of her. In falling he caught the eye of his photograph and noticed its mild commiseration. But he soon forgot this and everything else.

  There was no question now of persuasion. Indeed he was no longer sure whose the urgency was. With such skilful accommodations of her body did Gwendoline assist him to undress her that Foley experienced a rapturous confusion between subject and object, like a moment of contemplation. He was already sitting his loins with grateful care into the vale of her raised knees when a series of piercing whistles came up to them from below, checking him poised above her. Looking down he discovered an expression of startled conjecture on her face. ‘It’s only Moss,’ he said, with a dim hope of being permitted to continue. But her body had stiffened; it had ceased, by a subtle process, to be available; the warm collaboration between them was lost; after a further moment Gwendoline covered her nakedness hastily with the first thing that came to hand – a corner of the Royal Stuart.

  ‘Moss has come back from his walk,’ Foley said, in a wailing undertone. ‘Moss,’ he repeated in accents of loathing, hissing final s’s. Seeing that nothing further was now to be hoped for, he began looking round for his trousers. He felt utterly wretched. The sweet dew of anticipation chilled on his body. His testicles ached with disappointment. The whistling, in which some attempt at an ordered sequence was discernible, continued unabated.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Gwendoline whispered. ‘I really am sorry. I’m disappointed too. But I just couldn’t have done it with him whistling all the time like that.’

  They dressed in silence. The whistling continued without a break, accompanied now by occasional clattering noises from what seemed to be the kitchen. By the time they were ready to leave the bedroom Foley had decided that it was either ‘Loch Lomond’ or ‘Begone Dull Care’. At the top of the stairs he began speaking in loud and cheerful tones. To anyone below it must have sounded as sudden as a gong striking. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘that’s all there is to it, really. Not a great deal perhaps in terms of actual space, but we get through quite a bit of work here, I can tell you. It’s a small business of course … Oh, hallo, Michael! I thought I heard somebody whistling. “Loch Lomond” wasn’t it?’

  ‘It was “Roamin’ in the Gloamin’ ”,’ Moss said, rather coldly.

  ‘Let me introduce my partner Michael Moss … This is Gwendoline Rogers.’

  ‘How do you do?’ Moss
said heavily. ‘What do you think of the place?’

  ‘I think it’s absolutely lovely. I’m surprised, really I am.’

  Moss’s features relaxed slightly. ‘Tea is not quite ready yet,’ he said. ‘It won’t be long.’

  ‘Never mind, never mind,’ exclaimed Foley. ‘Come and sit down, Gwendoline. I’ve just been showing Gwendoline round the place.’

  ‘Terribly nice,’ said Gwendoline, smiling at Moss.

  They went into the living-room and sat down. Moss remained at the door for a few moments. ‘I didn’t know you were here,’ he said. ‘Until I heard you talking up there.’

  Oh yes, I was just showing –’

  ‘When did you come in?’

  ‘About half an hour ago, I suppose it would be,’ Foley said. ‘That would be about it, wouldn’t you say, Gwendoline?’

  ‘Yes, about half an hour,’ Gwendoline said. Foley noticed that Gwendoline’s expression was much more alert than usual. Her eyes seemed wider-open and she was sitting upright in her chair with her hands carefully disposed in her lap.

  Moss looked from one to the other of them in silence for a moment then he said, ‘I’ll go and see to the tea then, if you’ll excuse me.’

  ‘Of course,’ Gwendoline said, smiling graciously. ‘He doesn’t like me,’ she said as soon as Moss had disappeared. ‘I can sense it.’

  ‘Oh, you mustn’t mind him,’ Foley said. ‘He’s a very shy person, really.’